Open Access E-books

It is not just e-journals that are Open Access, some e-books are now Open Access too. A work is considered to be Open Access when it is available to read for free in its entirety, without any restriction on who can access it.

Open Access e-books help:

Authors of scholarly books ensure that their work connects with the widest possible audiences.

Readers from all over the world gain free and unlimited access to high quality scholarly e-books.

Libraries provide more access to quality content to their users with no price barriers.

They aim for academic publishing to become fairer, faster and more accessible. All of the titles are made available online for free and can be read on the website, downloaded in various formats, reused or embedded anywhere. Once downloaded the e-book is yours to keep!

The e-books work with the majority of mobile devices and e-readers. To find out which devices you can download the e-book to and for instructions for Kindle, please follow this link.

Many of their titles come equipped with digital resources freely available on the website, including extra chapters, reviews, links and image galleries.

University of Glasgow staff and students even get a 15% discount from the print version of the book!

Knowledge Unlatched

Unlike Open Book Publishers, Knowledge Unlatched do not publish the books but facilitate them being made open access.Libraries from around the world share the payment of a single title fee to a publisher to cover the publication costs. In return the publisher ‘unlatches’ the e-book and it is made available as a fully downloadable open access PDF. You can learn more about it in the below video clip.

The collection includes 106 titles covering topics in the Humanities (Anthropology, Literature, History) and Social Sciences (Politics, Media & Communications) from 26 respected scholarly publishers including Routledge, Brill, Bloomsbury, Cambridge University Press and Edinburgh University Press.